new director. And you needed to be able to get into his mind to see how he thinks He was a lot more knowledgeable than I gave him credit for going in. And I had to learn that the hard way. Aside from working with his actors, he also was thinking of the mechanics of the gags. He always wanted to know "What's your feeling on this?" And I would tell him. Most of the time, I was there. But more than one time was I in the process of rigging something when he'd make a suggestion that turned my head and made me say "That would be a lot easier, better way to do that. I have to be honest. " We didn't understand. I'd just come off of The A-Team with Baxley who we used to call "Bax to the Max". His attitude was "How big can it get?" That's not McTiernan's attitude. He has a particular vision of what he wants to see, and it wasn't always bigger is better. He'll give you the time and the chances to let you find it, and when you found it, it works. Screenwriter John Thomas on the Predator's camouflage effect: Jim had an idea in the form of a dream he had. In the dream, he was peering into an ovoid chrome room through a hole. Inside the room was a little man who was made out of chrome. You couldn't see him - he was reflected everywhere at once - until he moved. Then you saw this leading edge of his physical being, and that's all. That began the fascination with what this thing looked like and what its capabilities were. We envisioned it as a physical adaptation. In the film it was basically a suit. (Helfrich) I was on the film before they started shooting. We had done some visual-effects tests for the creature's invisibility effect. We saw several tests. One was just a single warp. We chose the concentric configuration of warps as being the most interesting and the most visible. Because a lot of the shots would be really long shots, the creature would be really small. You'd have to have enough of an effect to see anything. Nowadays this effect is rather commonplace, but then it was revolutionary. The Predator's camouflage effect was created by dressing an actor in a red spandex suit, which stood out from the background. Because the suit was the only red element in the frame it could in essence be pulled out of the image, leaving behind a silhouette. To enhance the suit's redness, it was lit with red lights. During production, the crew would shoot a first take of the action with the red-suited actor. In additional takes the camera's movement would be repeated, but without the actor and with a wider lens. Visual Effects Coordinator Joel Hynek: Everything was done optically in those days. We'd start with the photography of the red suit in the jungle. From that we'd pull a silhouette matte. Then from that we'd pull an opposite matte, where the Predator's clear. The clear mattes would be pulled from footage shot with the wider lens. The wider lens created images of the background that were a different size than those captured in the first take. Hynek would take the clear mattes and divide them into between eight and 15 concentric rings, progressing towards the centre - what he calls "inline mattes". The background inside the clear matte would be of a different size and, because Hynek had divided the clear mattes into concentric rings, the Predator seems to be invisible while also bending the light of the background. To enhance the three-dimensionality of this effect, R/Greenberg's optical crew would change the size of the rings: The outer ones would be smaller while the inner ones would be wider. All of this footage - usually three negatives - would be composited in an optical printer. (Hynek) Each shot would take as many as 15 passes. ------------------------------ Читайте также: - текст Дневник камикадзе на английском - текст Северная сторона на английском - текст Плывущие водоросли на английском - текст Дама с собачкой на английском - текст Зима приносит смерть на английском |